House­keep­ing for Begin­ners – first-look review

Step­ping into the house­hold of health­care work­er Dita (Ana­maria Mar­in­ca) can be a lit­tle dis­ori­ent­ing at first. Name­less peo­ple bust in and out of rooms in loud, over­lap­ping con­ver­sa­tions, a fren­zied state that only helps blur the lines between the rela­tion­ships that co-exist with­in the large res­i­dence they all share in the North Mace­don­ian cap­i­tal of Skopje.

We get to know these rela­tion­ships through the eyes of cheer­ful Ali (Sam­son Selim), who wakes up in the big house after a one-night stand with much old­er Toni (Vladimir Tin­tor). The young man finds no dis­com­fort in the unknown, turn­ing the liv­ing room into a dance floor and pulling the house’s youngest res­i­dents – lit­tle chat­ter­box Mia (Dza­da Selim) and moody teen Vane­sa (Mia Mustafa) – into a danc­ing ses­sion to the catchy beats of Konstrakta’s ​‘In Cor­pore Sano’, the 2022 Ser­bian Euro­vi­sion entry. Ali’s breezy buoy­an­cy clash­es with Dita’s guard­ed stern­ness, but even­tu­al­ly mel­lows the woman, the boy act­ing as a wel­come breath of fresh air at a time when Dita is faced with sud­den loss and the weighty respon­si­bil­i­ties that come with it.

Goran Stolevski’s House­keep­ing for Begin­ners is best enjoyed with­out much knowl­edge of the tan­gled lines that con­nect the char­ac­ters who pass through the doors of the house. It is, at its core, a film about found fam­i­ly and the unex­pect­ed roles we find our­selves play­ing thanks to life’s woes and serendip­i­ties. It is a film about sur­vival and assim­i­la­tion, too, explor­ing themes of queer­ness and guilt that Stolevs­ki touched upon in Of An Age while also see­ing the direc­tor return to his home coun­try fol­low­ing the folk hor­ror You Won’t Be Alone.

House­keep­ing for Begin­ners is Stolevski’s most emo­tion­al­ly mature out­ing yet, and trips only in rhythm. The direc­tor is unable to con­cise­ly organ­ise an ever-expand­ing pool of sub­plots, dilut­ing the mov­ing nature of the sto­ry with a nag­ging need to prod at what is best left unsaid. The idea of a safe house at the heart of North Mace­do­nia is an inter­est­ing enough foun­da­tion for an exam­i­na­tion of the country’s treat­ment of its queer peo­ple, and even more so when cou­pled with the dis­crim­i­na­tion suf­fered by the Romani in the coun­try. Ali sits at this thorny inter­sec­tion but is nev­er allowed to exist beyond the box of a nifty nar­ra­tive device, a waste of not only a fer­tile sto­ry­line but a stel­lar turn by new­com­er Selim.

Still, there are many great­ly mov­ing moments in the director’s third fea­ture, all con­nect­ed by a heart­felt under­stand­ing of the val­ue of nur­tur­ing com­pan­ion­ship. Love, with­in Dita’s crowd­ed house­hold, man­i­fests itself in many ways. It can be found on the long din­ing table where deep food bowls share space with old cig­a­rette ash­es, in clothes dry­ing side by side under the scorch­ing sun, and in the prompt, life-chang­ing leaps tak­en by those who have spent a life lov­ing and griev­ing in painful soli­tude. These moments are sparse and often clunki­ly framed but effec­tive nonethe­less, a tes­ta­ment to Stolevski’s poignant ode to the rad­i­cal poten­tial of camaraderie.